Since the Lord of the Rings saga ended with 2003’s Return of the King, the big screen has been tragically devoid of Hollywood fantasy. A few would-be imitators have come and gone (Uwe Boll’s In the Name of the King acting as the final nail in the coffin), and young adult fiction adaptations, most tween riffs on LOTR anyway, have found more success with romantic tales or small-scale dystopian adventures. The megaplex isn’t much of a home monsters and magic and sword fights and British accents.
Hopefully that changes with Snow White and the Huntsman, a blockbuster adaptation of the classic fairy tale with all the makings of an epic fantasy. The latest trailer for the movie demands the comparison — much like Peter Jackson’s Tolkien trilogy, the commitment to craft is just as important to the story thread that brings together the otherworldly elements on display. Handmade costumes, intricate metalwork, complicated CG effects and the laborious task of coordinating hundreds of extras to duke it out on the battlefield — every aspect of the movie is painstakingly constructed by SWATH‘s enormous crew to make the action on screen as believable as possible. As LOTR taught us, fantasy is at its best when it’s treated like reality.
The latest spot for Snow White has an interactive element: as the footage plays, you can click along and bring up featurette videos that pull back the curtain on the movies many challenging feats. How did they get the magic mirror to pour out into a human figure? How did they make that beastly troll? How many rats crawled all over Kristen Stewart’s face over the course of the film? All these questions and more are packed into the annotated trailer. Learn a lesson in movie magic by watching the video below, before Snow White and the Huntsman hits theaters June 1:
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[Photo Credit: Universal Pictures]
